DeStringing and others

dachef

Hello,

Thanks in advance for any help provided.

There are a couple of things I need worked out.

First off. This might be simple, but i can't figure it out. I have a script that determines the current month and the last month, to be used to access a database. The script is below:

//Initialize month
$amonth = array("january", "february", "march", "april", "may", "june", "july", "august", "september", "october", "november", "december");
$month = gmdate ("m");
$cmonth = $month-01;
$lmonth = $month-02;
$curmonth = $amonth[$cmonth].01;
$prevmonth = $amonth[$lmonth].01;

as you can see its very crude. it works, but there is a problem. In January, this snippit won't tell me that the last month was December. What i need is a way to figure out the last month in textual format and place into a variable for use.

The second thing, is quite related. As you can see from the snippit above, i take the name of the month, i.e. october, and add it to _01 to get october_01, for example.

This is used as the name of a table. What I need to be able to do is to take that string, and break it up. For example october_01, gets broken up into october -and- _01. This way i can use this for a search drop down list.

Thanks again for any help provided.

Mike

[deleted]

About the months, use mktime to make a timestamp. Mktime lets you cheat by putting negative values for hour/min/sec/month/day to get values in the past.
echo mktime(0,0,0,1,1,2001);
echo mktime(0,0,0,-1,1,2001);

then use date() to get the monthname from the timestamp.

About the table names, what kind of database design warrants the use of seperate tables for each month?

dachef

Hi,

Well the database is for a section of an f1 site, the news section. So each month has a seperate table. And because this is gonna be a long lasting site (hopefully) then i needed to put the _01 afterwards so i know what year the month is for.

I wanted the search page to be very exact, so to do that, i wanted to get the number of tables in a database (so far i have october and november) remove the _01 from it and then place them in a drop down list. i think you can see what im trying to do.

As for the mktime, thanks i will try that. I just hope i can figure it out. if you can give me an example, so i can have an idea, i would be much obliged....thanks..

Mike

[deleted]

Why don't you just put all the news items in one large table with a datefield?
You can easily order/select/group by the date:

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE MONTH(date_field)=3
AND YEAR(date_field)=2001

dachef

I don't know, when i started out designing the structure of the database, i thought i would put each month seperate..that way i have smaller tables, quicker searches.

Call it stupidity, or organization tactics, whatever. Point is its a little late to change it, and i really don't want to go back and modify the code. And i sort of like it like this.

So, i take it there is no way to destring? i can't take the october out of october_01?

thanks for any help..

Mike

hometoast

to "destring" use the substr function and the strlen function.
or with the substr_replace.
There's a ton of string manipulation functions.

[deleted]

"..that way i have smaller tables, quicker searches"

that is only partially true.
Using a seperate table for each month means that you cannot search two months at the same time unless you JOIN them.
Imagine doing a search on the past three years, that would use 36 tables in one query... ouch.

If you'renot planning to have thousands of newsitems a month then there is no need to split them up for performance.

If I were you I'd drop what you have, and start over. You will hate yourself in a few months time when it's time to do some complex searches.

dachef

ok, i have been taking in what you are saying, and i have been giving it some thought.

on average i put up between 3 to 5 news articles per day. so that times 30 days average...its only 150 articles per month. in a year its 1800 articles. If you really think i should just put the months together, then ok, no prob. i will do that, its not that much work to do actually, only a few pages of code..(although i was kinda proud of the month error checking script i wrote...)

But it is 1800 articles a year, thats alot. So what do you think about breaking up the database into years instead? I think i can deal with that easily enough..(this way i won't even need the previous month script i have been trying to achieve...)

and the destringing too....lol...

tell me what you think if i did that...i will go on your word, since i am not an expert in php yet...

thanks for the help.
Mike

hometoast

1800 is a lot? I got news for you - thats "nuthin". If you were doing 180,000.. then MAYBE. 1800 is a lot if you're running a DB server on an Atari. With proper indexing and db design, 1800 is a SMALL (and fast) database. Dont worry about that kind of quantity.

dachef

Alright then,

i'm convinced. I will change it around to be by year rather than by month.

Thank you for your help.

Mike

hometoast

why split it at all. you could go 10 years and only have 18000 records by your estimates. Even that is not a large db.

I converted an access db to mysql. It was realestate rental inventory. Each record contained a LOT of information. We had 60000 rows. Even complex queries on my 400mhz home machine would take only a few/several seconds. I believe (after I tweaked the db structure) the .myd file was about 6MB-not large at all. Just food for thought, good luck

[deleted]

I would also just put everything in one table.
Splitting it up by date only makes sense if you have so many records that performance becomes an issue, or you need to 'archive' records for some purpose.

If you are just selecting records by date, ie: the latest 10 items or so, then you will hardly notice the speed difference between 10 rows and 18000.

[deleted]

"although i was kinda proud of the month error checking script i wrote.."

People come up with the most complex and interesting scripts when they try to work around a very simple problem. :-)

Store that script, keep it in your archives. It will come in usefull later.

dachef

Well thanks for the help guys. Im changing the Database around. and i think i finally got it licked. Thanks again.

Mike

Anon

This is testing